Do you feel these ratings are exagerated or pretty realistic? I believe the 1200 watt rating of my World 1.2 to be a bit exagerated.

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Are you bridging it into its optimum load?

At one time I had a Peavey Kilobass...very similar to the DPC1400X...I believe it had the same power section as did the predecessor DPC1000. Anyway, it was ridiculously loud. The preamp was unacceptably (to me) noisy, though.

Both are rated fairly. The Lab Gruppen also has another great feature on it I haven't seen on other amps. Its has dip switch's on the back to adjust the sensitivity of the input of the amp. So if your running a bass directly into it or a preamp with low output or a preamp with high output you can adjust its input sensitivity which will help performance wise of the amp. The LG weighs in at the 19 Lb range and the Crest Pro 200 is in the 20-21 range.

Its a switching (class D) amp, but i'm not sure if it has a conventional or switched power supply.

Didn't the Carver amps have switched power supply, or something like that? Maybe it was stepped instead of switching?

Randy

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The K series have conventional supplies.

Carver made some of the first lightweight power amps in about the late 70s or early 80s, but they didn't really have a switch-mode power supply. Instead they used an interesting circuit that chopped the incoming AC, so that the resulting di/dT, much higher than that of the line frequency, allowed the use of a much smaller transformer that was fine under most circumstances. It had a PWM controller on the chopper, so that the duty cycle increased when the amp needed more power through the transformer. This was also its main weak point, because as the duty cycle neared 100% for very heavy power demand, the waveform approached that of the regular line-frequency AC voltage, for which the small transformer was very inadequate. The tranny would saturate, and the rail voltages would collapse. It was an interesting concept from a "cutting edge" POV, but that collapsing phenomenon has influenced people's perception and expectation of lightweight power amps to some degree ever since--some amps deservedly, though most not.